I explore the interactions between comparative, competitive and absolute advantage in a two-country model of oligopoly in general equilibrium. Comparative advantage always determines the direction of trade, but both competitive and absolute advantage affect resource allocation, trade patterns and trade volumes. Competitive advantage in the sense of more home firms drives foreign firms out of ma...

One of the best established empirical results in international economics is that bilateral trade decreases with distance. Although well-known, this result has not been systematically analyzed before. We examine 1467 distance effects estimated in 103 papers. Information collected on each estimate allows us to test hypotheses about the causes of variation in the estimates. Our most interesting fi...

This paper provides striking confirmation of the restrictions of the structural gravity model of trade. Structural forces predicted by theory explain 95% of the variation of the fixed effects used to control for them in the recent gravity literature, fixed effects that in principle could reflect other forces. This validation opens avenues to inferring unobserved sectoral activity and multilater...

This paper provides striking confirmation of the restrictions of the structural gravity model of trade. Structural forces predicted by theory explain 95% of the variation of the fixed effects used to control for them in the recent gravity literature, fixed effects that in principle could reflect other forces. This validation opens avenues to inferring unobserved sectoral activity and multilater...

This paper argues the widespread adoption of Just-in-Time (JIT) logistics provides a key to understanding the growth in the U.S. trade share. To do so, I develop a dynamic trade model based on the choice of the logistics technology used in a firm’s supply chain. The model’s predicted trade dynamics depend on how the set of firms using JIT with international suppliers changes over time. A numeri...

This paper provides some new empirical perspectives on the relationship between international trade and macroeconomic fluctuations in industrial economies. First, a comprehensive set of stylized facts concerning fluctuations in trade variables and their determinants is presented. A measure of the quantitative importance of international trade for the propagation of domestic business cycles is t...

Using the methodology developed in Kehoe and Ruhl (2013), I measure the change in the extensive, or new goods, margin of trade between Austria and the ten new entrants to the European Union in 2004. On average, the new goods account for 56% of the bilateral trade flow after enlargement. A time series measure shows growth in the new goods margin coincides with the period surrounding the 2004 enl...

This paper identifies a flaw in the infant industry argument that previous literature has ignored. A simple model first replicates the infant industry logic but subsequently shows that, in the presence of a ‘traditional technology’ with poor growth potential, the infant-industry logic is likely to fail. Under protectionism domestic producers substitute advanced technologies with the low-growth ...

The paper estimates an empirical relation based on Krugman’s “technological gap” model to explore the influence of the pattern of international trade and production on the overall productivity growth of a developing country. A key result is that increased import competition in medium-growth (but not in lowor highgrowth) manufacturing sectors enhances overall productivity growth. The authors als...

The rise of Western Europe after 1500 is due largely to growth in countries with access to the Atlantic Ocean and with substantial trade with the New World, Africa, and Asia via the Atlantic. This trade and the associated colonialism affected Europe not only directly, but also indirectly by inducing institutional change. Where “initial” political institutions (those established before 1500) pla...